The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-user as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices, networks, business applications and other software, and the like.
As part of managed storage services, a storage service provider maintains and manages the storage infrastructure for an enterprise customer. To maintain a flexible storage infrastructure for multiple clients, managed storage services offerings typically use storage virtualization. Whenever a customer desires an update to its storage service, a manual workflow is executed involving creating a ticket, notifying the architect, and deployment of personnel who then execute the change. Such heavy manual involvement can be very challenging for large scale infrastructures and incurs significant cost. It also makes planning a labor intensive task.